[442] _Rural Economy_ (1771), pp. 173-5. Trusler, who wrote in 1780, mentions 'the general rage for farming throughout the kingdom.'--_Practical Husbandry_, p. I. [443] In 1780 Sir Thomas Bernard, travelling through Northumberland, saw 'luxuriant plantations, neat hedges, rich crops of corn, comfortable farmhouses' in a county whereof the greater part was barren moor dearly rented at 1s. 6d. an acre thirty years before, and he said the county had increased in annual value fourfold, (Contemporary MS., unpublished.) [444] _Rural Economy_, p. 26. [445] _Farmer's Letters_ (3rd ed.), p. 89. [446] Slater, _English Peasantry and Enclosure_, p. 95. [447] Ibid. p. 101. [448] Young, _Northern Tour_, iv. 340, about 1770 estimates the cultivated land of England to be half pasture and half arable, and, in the absence of reliable statistics, his opinion on this point is certainly the best available. The conversion of a large portion of the richer land from arable to grass in the eighteenth century was compensated for, according to Young, by the conversion, on enclosure, of poor sandy soils and heaths or moors into corn land. Hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. 370-1. [449] Young, _Northern Tour_, i. 222. [450] _Rural Economy_, p. 252. [451] Ibid. p. 271. [452] Cf. above, p. 180. [453] _Farmer's Letters_ (3rd ed), p. 372. [454] _Northern Tour_, iv. 167. [455] Ibid. iv. 186. [456] This large item is explained by the fact that a bailiff was employed to sell, and no bailiff could find customers 'without feeling the same drought as stage coachmen when they see a sign'.--Young, _Farmer's Letters_, p. 403. [457] _Rural Economy_, p. 314. [458] 1775, pp. x-xiii. [459] _Northern Tour_, iv. 192-202. [460] See _Parliamentary Reports Commission_ (1881), xvi. 260. [461] _Dissertations on Rural Subjects_, p. 278. [462] _Farmer's Letters_, p. 433. [463] _History of Hawsted_, p. 169. [464] Hasbach, _op. cit._ p. 127; Kent, _Hints to Gentlemen_, p. 152. [465] _Southern Tour_, p. 324. He says nothing of the manufacturing towns, which had not yet began to influence the wages of farm labourers near them as they soon afterwards did. [466] Some prices at this time were: bread per lb., 2d.; butter, 5-1/2d. to 8d.; cheese, 3-1/2d. to 4d.; beef, 3d. to 5d.; mutton, 3-1/2d. to 5d. [467] _State of the Poor_, i. 562. [468] According to Walter Harte, though the yeoman in the middle of the seventeenth century ate bread of rye and barley (maslin), in 1766 even the poor cottagers looked upon it with horror and demanded best wheaten bread. Yet in 1766 the quartern loaf in London was 1s. 6d.--Tooke, _History of Prices_, i. 68. [469] _History of Hawsted_, p. 184. [470] Eden, _State of the Poor_, i. 513. [471] _Rural Economy of Gloucestershire_, i. 53. [472] Eden, _op. cit._ i. 547. [473] _Farmer's Letters_, i. 300